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| Home Front: Culture Wars |
| Lost Eden: The world of Robert A. Heinlein |
| 2007-07-12 |
| Very long. Here's an excerpt Watching the recent furor over the Senate immigration bill, I found myself wondering if this was perhaps a first in U.S. history: a sort of Peasants’ Revolt against the now-enormous and massively entrenched (and increasingly endogamous) elites. It has long been a commonplace, confirmed over and over again by polls, that the elite-commoner gap on the immigration issue is wider than on any other. It may be that this is only the first of many such issues. As the elites pull away from the rest of us, and the rest of us become more atomized and disorganized — “a heap of loose sand” in Sun Yat-sen’s memorable phrase about the late-Imperial Chinese — we may be headed for the kind of intractable elite-commoner hostility predicted by Michael Young in his 1958 book The Rise of the Meritocracy. I don’t think it is fanciful to see an element of this in the current widespread anger towards the political class — the president’s approval ratings down in the 30s, and Congress’s even lower. Some of that is anger at particular policies — Iraq, the immigration bill. Much, though — a rising proportion, I believe — is systemic: a feeling that the elites are now running the show for their own interests, Latin-America-style, with not much regard for ours. As my reader X (see above) correctly observed: “The low paid politician has vanished. The surest route to wealth is politics, followed closely by government service.” |
| Posted by:gromgoru |